Tabletmag: The Rise of the Alt-Right

August 11, 2023 Hunter Wallace Alt-Right, Conservatism, Polarization, Politics, Populists, Progressives 37

Editor’s Note: It has been six years since the torch march in Charlottesville.

As a brand, the Alt-Right is dead.

It has gone the way of White Nationalism which was itself a rebrand. Many of the most influential figures in the Alt-Right have completely imploded or flamed out like Richard Spencer and MILO. Some of us who were involved in the Alt-Right are now older and look back on that period with a twinge of embarrassment. What were we doing associating with clowns like Andrew Anglin?

And yet, even though the brand is dead and hardly anyone claims affiliation with the umbrella label these days, the movement is still very much alive and thriving in a weird way. Keith Woods is being retweeted by Elon Musk. Richard Hanania’s past as Richard Hoste has been the talk of rightwing Twitter over the past week. BAP’s fantasies about slaying millions of human bugmen in the streets is scaring mainstream liberals in The Atlantic. This stuff used to appeal to a small audience on blogs and forums.

Consider Peter Brimelow and VDARE. In what sense is VDARE an extremist website in 2023? Nearly all Republicans want to curtail Third World immigration and at least 70% are explicitly opposed to the Great Replacement. The so-called normal or mainstream Republicans have been reduced to a rump 15% of the party. My paleoconish views on immigration, trade and foreign policy haven’t changed in twenty years. It is people like Charlie Kirk who have radically changed over the past six or seven years.

Occidental Dissent is positioned at the intersection of White Nationalism, Neo-Confederacy, Christian Nationalism, paleoconservatism and post-liberalism. Have we really lost when over half of Southern Republicans are open to the idea of dissolving the Union or when Christian nationalism is thriving among evangelical Protestants or when conservative liberalism has lost its hegemony over the Right?

Tablet Mag:

The alt-right burst into public consciousness seemingly overnight—a radical, sometimes esoteric political ideology pointing a knife at the heart of American liberal democracy.

Harnessing racist and misogynistic energies from deplorable recesses of the internet, the movement thrust itself into national relevance as a force to be reckoned with in the 2016 campaign season. Donald Trump appeared to ride the alt-right tiger to the presidency where his chief strategist, “alt-lite” impresario Steve Bannon, occupied the corridors of the West Wing. Yet, following the Charlottesville rally in mid-2017, the project and its most public champions disappeared almost as quickly as they had emerged.

Six years after Charlottesville, it seems clear that the alt-right’s coherence and influence were dramatically overstated in the rush to explain Trumpism and larger upheavals in the U.S. political scene. At the same time, however, judging the alt-right as a set of ideas and ideological claims, rather than as an organization or collection of personalities, we have to grapple with something that feels uncomfortably like its success. Most of the movement’s ideas are now widespread on the American right. But before we can evaluate the alt-right’s successes and failures, first we have to address a more fundamental question. …

Leading figures associated with the alt-right have disappeared into obscurity, self-immolated, and reinvented themselves as centrists. Meanwhile, the ideology’s ideas have diffused across the political landscape. As a movement, the alt-right failed. Its ascendance, such as it was, was always more symptomatic of a larger transformation: the collapse of guardrails and gatekeepers on the right.

I agree.

There is simply no need for an Alt-Right or Dissident Right in 2023. Curtis Yarvin’s view of The Cathedral or the Deep State is now how the mainstream Right understands itself in relation to institutions. My friend James Edwards is the median Populist Right voter in 2023.

John Ganz:

What I can say with a lot of confidence, is just about everybody in the vanguard of the right-wing, among its intellectuals, its staffer class, its journalists, etc. is in daily close proximity to some form or another of fascist or white supremacist propaganda. And I don’t mean this in the “woke,” everything-is-kinda-white-supremacy way, I mean this in it literally bubbled up from Nazi message boards and the like. At the very least, they do not react in horror at coming into close contact with someone or something from the real extreme. It’s titillating for them. Perhaps it might be worrisome for their career prospects, but not for their sense of themselves. They barely bother to really hide it anymore! It’s in their feeds. It’s in their DMs. It’s their real life social networks. It’s just the air they breathe. Even if they are afraid to hold or evince extreme views, they will admire those who do as the cooler ones and heroes. For the brainier of the set, even as they mock those who talk about fascism as hysterics, they eat up the works of Jünger, Evola, or Schmitt. This is what you have to realize about these people: It’s all lies, all the way down; to themselves and to others. The other thing: there is a reason why people don’t say “alt-right” anymore, there is no more “alternative”, this is just the Right. This is who they are.

In my view, the history of the movement can be divided into four phases:

1. The Edgy Vanguard – This was the period before 2016 when the conservative establishment was still strong and there was a hard barrier between the Alt-Right or Dissident Right and the mainstream Right. Conservative liberalism was the dominant ideology of the Right and was championed by candidates like W., John McCain and Mitt Romney. The Senate was full of people like Mitch McConnell.

2. The Breakthrough – The rise of Trump toppled the conservative establishment in 2016 and discredited conservative liberalism. Conservative institutions were still strong and people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell reigned in Congress. Donald Trump was like an island in his own administration and in the wider government. He was surrounded by a sea of mainstream conservatives, but what had previously been marginalized Alt-Right or Dissident Right ideas began pouring into the mainstream Right. The organized movement got ahead of itself in 2017- misreading the breakthrough of the Trump victory in the 2016 election as a total triumph – and cracked up after Charlottesville.

3. The Tipping Point – Clearly, this happened in 2020 as a result of the COVID lockdowns, the George Floyd riots and Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. Millions of people were radicalized on the Right by this experience. It began showing up in the polls in early 2021. 1/6 was a symptom of this.

4. Mass Radicalization – This has been the story of the rightwing backlash against the Biden presidency when previously marginalized Alt-Right or Dissident Right ideas began to permeate the mainstream Right to the point where the old boundary between fringe and mainstream has nearly vanished. Nick Fuentes and America First, for example, are more pro-homosexual than Turning Point USA who they used to protest in the Groyper War. Both support Trump although Matt Walsh has better content.

We lost people like Richard Spencer and Evan McLaren along the way. Spencer started his doomed Alt-MSNBC venture at the very moment his former cause took off.

The entire Alt-Right package also hasn’t gone mainstream – explicit White racial consciousness, the Jewish Question, Nietzscheanism, sympathy for National Socialism – but nearly everything else either already has or is getting close. There is nothing fringe anymore about wanting an isolationist foreign policy or a nationalist trade policy or immigration restriction or opposing anti-Whiteism. Even Ron DeSantis is comfortable with wielding state power to punish enemies and reward friends. So much of what were marginalized for saying is now mainstream that it is pointless to carry on as a fringe group. There will always be people like that and their influence has shrunk as they have become more of a subculture.

Ramzpaul used to be an Alt-Right influencer. He is just part of the rightwing scene these days like Mark Dice. The mainstream Right is now much closer to Ramzpaul than Freedom Conservatism. A whole generation of people has also come of age that doesn’t remember True Conservatism. The David French arc from the cuckservative Never Trump columnist at National Review (2015) to the debate with Sohrab Ahmari (2019) to the total pariah he is now (2023) illustrates the shift.

I identify as a normie rightwinger these days, not as an “alt” or “dissident.” I was an early adopter and saw further ahead than most people on my demographic, but there is nothing special about my views anymore.

Note: I saw this blast from the past on CNN yesterday.

36 Comments

  1. >financialization that had been central to mainstream conservatism since its inception

    Took a Kiwi converso to say it

    • “nothing fringe anymore about wanting an isolationist foreign policy or a nationalist trade policy or immigration restriction or opposing anti-Whiteism”

      The public s opinion floats on the tide of circumstance.
      There is nothing foresighted in the mass of public opinion.

      That’s the reason I endlessly say that only natural forces ,ie financial, structural failures, wil change a society.

      The German people totally rejected Hitler, until they were freezing and starving.

      • Dementia Joe may have the same effect as the Weimar Regime in finally waking up normies and getting them to take their own side for a change. That is the great fear of the ruling class, White normies no longer being splintered and afraid of a stupid, made up word: racism. If Dementia Joe’s agenda starts to bite in 2024 with gasoline prices $5/gallon or more and inflation raging (nothing is more inflationary than increasing fuel prices) as well as the diversity types taking their righteous anger to the suburbs Trump will sound like a liberal by that time.

        Unfortunately, it takes massive state failures with its attendant suffering to snap Whites out of self-destructive thinking to just go along with things. Half a loaf is better than no loaf, the other guy is worse, democracy is the best form of government, if we vote the right guy in to office etc. When the electricity is on intermittently to save the climate, food is scarce, colored people get priority in hospitals and everything else, Whites are pilloried on TV and in schools, the worst people are getting reparations and on top of this pyramid of shit sits The Usual Suspects, profiting from it all and laughing at the cattle maybe then things will be bad enough to tip over GloboHomo Shopping Mall. A defeat at the hands of China over Taiwan and a refusal of Whites to be conscripted into another of GloboHomo Shopping Mall Empire’s wars will be the end for the current ruling class.

      • @Arrian…

        “The German people totally rejected Hitler, until they were freezing and starving.”

        Germany never accepted Hitler, or, at least, not in vote.

        I want to draw your attention to something – Hitler never got more than slightly more than 1/3 the national vote.

        He took office by sly means, more than a bit of which is not attributable to him.

        A majority of Germans, by 1937, 1938, came to approve of him because it was impossible to not see what he was doing as good, or, at least, good for the majority of Germans.

        And, with the military victories of 1939, 1940, and 1941, he reach a level of approval in German eyes matched only by the current Russian approval of Vladimir Putin.

        As Björn Höcke, the current head of the powerful Der Flügel wing of the growing ADF (Alternative for Germany Party) has been quoted as saying, ‘Hitler was not all that bad, in many respects.’

        And that is why The German Government is scrambling desperately to put together a new Communist Party around Sara Wagenknecht – this in order to siphon off protest votes from the ‘Nazi-ADF”

        Because, at the current rate they are growing, the ADF will ruloe Germany in 4 years – without or without any coalition support.

        As it stand, in a recent vote in Thuringia, all the parties ganged up on the ADF candidate (the so-called mild-mannered Nazi Robert Sesselmann) – and Sesselmann still beat all of them, anyway!

        THE SCORE?

        Sesselmann 53

        Everybody Else but the sink 47

        Yss, grasp this – as Germany, Austria, slide towards reprising a Central European Coalition from a century ago, the Anglo-Jewish world is shaking in their sandals.

        Very exciting to see the old Ausrira-Hungary and Germany rising from the ashes.

        I watch a lot of their news every day, and it is plain to see what is occurring – this in spite of the fact that much of the public of those countries, are just as lamentably brainwashed against their own kind as are we.

  2. One of the interesting thing about this development is how the contrarians have split with the genuine believers as this process moves along. Richard Spencer moved to the center with his stated beliefs but last I checked was associated with an e-cult of Apollo worship mixed with atheist. Nick Fuentes is holding a crucifix while being surrounded by homosexuals, people claiming to be pedophiles and actual pedophiles and claiming they are all based. Heck we even have Alex Jones saying Blaire White is beautiful and that he should have been on the Bud Light can.

    There are some people that were attracted to dissident politics because it felt like a way for them to stand out or be edgy. Now they are drifting towards the same beliefs they opposed 6 years ago because it’s becoming out of fashion in the public consciousness.

    • Bingo.

      The edgelords and contrarians just want to be edgelords and contrarians. Now that we are in a more mature stage of development, they have moved on

    • I remember Spencer saying at some point in late 2019 after the McSpencer group imploded that “I’m not going to be a pauper for the rest of my life.” It was one of his desperate, fringe interviews nobody watched. At the time I didn’t know what he meant. His Alt-MSNBC gig got going at around this time and he would lose his Cville lawyer the following summer. Spencer meant to say that he was not going to put his money where his mouth was. He probably did believe but his formerly plush living standards were at stake, and in the end comfort and envy mattered more than the cause.

      • Big talk from a guy with the screen-name “anonymous”.

        The best way to encourage someone to be a martyr is to lead by example. Given how little it’s taken to shift the conservative narrative (a few memes alongside the unraveling of liberaldom), it doesn’t seem wise to advocate for life-endangering, melodramatic, strategies at this point. Say what you want about Spencer, he was pivotal in helping bring about the sea-change (such that it is). He deserves a good retirement.

      • That is what they all say. What is the nature of the beast? What are inherent characteristics of Irish blood that are most noticeable and most apparent? A desire to have, or be in close proximity, to power, maybe? How many Lutheran are going to be the ballot come November? Do you see how the half German argument does not hold water?

  4. A lot of people are living in their own bubble including myself. Most people are only concerned about their zip code. As long as its “Not in my Backyard” or NIMB, people don’t generally care about what goes on. People in NYC only became concerned about illegal immigration when hundreds of homeless migrants squatted in Midtown Manhattan. They were all gone 2 days later, prodded somewhere by the NYPD where no one could see them. Then it was business as usual.

    The whole “not in my backyard” mentality came with the Boomer philosophy of “I’ve for mine, pal, so screw you”. Real estate costs are high on purpose to keep out undesirables from gentrified areas, which leaves Whites scrambling to make as much money as possible to avoid being left behind in no-go zones.

    Most people disagree with cultural marxist principles when asked. Most people say there are 2 genders and most people are opposed to open borders and illegal immigration. Our governments and institutions are representative of the minority left.

    • “As long as its “Not in my Backyard” or NIMB, people don’t generally care about what goes on. ”

      Yep, no concern and no foresight.

      It’s funny when the mad dog is chasing other people. It’s a national crisis when they are being chased.

      They are also self-righteous.

      “They deserve a bad situation because they aren’t good/smart/righteous like me.”

  5. The incredibly effective you tube/internet propaganda in 2016 during the election was the apex of the “alt-right”. Tens of millions of people saw these videos. I had never once seen rightwing content nearly as effective as these 2016 videos.

    Unfortunately it all went away election day, never to return. Most of you won’t receive it, but the truth is, that was the Russian A-team, their very best propagandists. On election night they were assigned elsewhere.

    The subsequent Jewish hysteria was actually about that Russian pro Trump internet campaign. It absolutely terrified them. Their goal was total censorship, so it would never happen again. In this, they succeeded.

  6. “‘Morning Joe’ might not exist [if Trump wins]”
    A national tragedy.

    “Freedom is over if Donald Trump gets elected”
    Looks like the current administration has beaten him to that.

  7. PUAs in the 00s described seduction as having three sequential phases: attraction, comfort-building, and closing. The same applies to this political seduction.

    Some, like Anglin and TRS, get stuck on getting attention and can’t transition to comfort-building.

    Keith Woods has been excellent at building comfort. He gives meta-political and moral support to others, encouraging whites to take their side without being personally obnoxious about it and without antagonizing adjacent groups. And he makes it easy for others to help him, mainly by acting normal. This is a different approach than, let us say, Greg Johnson, who decided to go hard on our greatest allies on Twitter at the exact moment they were pressuring Musk, on purpose, to make a point about free speech. He got banned. We need to make things easy for each other.

    Will the American right score? As things stand, Cold War baggage prevents the American right from achieving escape velocity from liberalism — ideas such as individualism, 1776, and freedom. Whether an election is won or a coup succeeds, the right won’t know the next move, like the dazed insurrectionists waddling through the halls of the Capitol.

    Internalizing collectivism is the remaining meta-political task before we get here. Collectivism has ethical, strategic, and economic implications that still need to be implemented.

    With ethics, the right can keep human waste out of leadership positions.

    Without a collective strategic outlook, other nations would be able to ruin North America if we succeed — if we’re Balkanized, imagine the Kremlin giving minorities heavy weaponry. “Leave us alone” isolationism is just macro individualism.

    Without a moderately socialistic platform that works for all, the right will continue to lack broad support among whites, who overwhelmingly want and benefit from European economic policies. Economics has plagued nationalism since the beginning. As an example, Polish nationalists in Galicia in 1846 got their asses handed to them by the very Polish peasantry they were trying to rally. The peasantry (correctly) viewed the Austrian Empire as looking out for their economic interests and feared the nationalists would return to the economic status quo, where the system exclusively benefitted the rich. Our situation is even more absurd since the entire executive class votes Democrat now.

    Nietzsche, while reactionary, is cancerous today because he encourages people to be individualists. Every Nietzschean is destined to become a lonely army of one like their master. He had his day in the sun during the Cold War, but now that Communism is gone, we need to put Nietzsche to rest, as we’re facing different conditions with different problems.

    Just some big-picture things to think about

      • @November…

        Very true, though, what is extremely peculiar about how communism has remanifested itself in The West, is that it is aligned to corporatism.

        More aptly put : I think that the new communists have little idea how they are being exploited by the oligarchs.

    • SOME DUDE, ” Without a moderately socialistic platform that works for all ” Founding stock white AMERICA didn’t bleed with GENERAL WASHINGTON at VALLEY FORGE for a socialistic platform, I hope, the smart people, with good hearts, purge it from their minds, it’s the first step, toward Marxism, Marxism is satanic, as well as the statism, that we have way too much of ,as it is, you want too impose it on a people, who are free, who want their REPUBLIC back, not going too happen though, so we wait on GOD, too destroy, MYSTERY BABYLON, if we survive, we who only desire too do the right thing, as our forbear’s did, will put The SOUTHERN REPUBLIC together and on the he map, GOD Willing, so in summary, “SOME DUDE,” good luck with your platform, but we will stick with our plan……..

      • @Terry

        I understand where you’re coming from. In the early 1800s, an ancestor of mine moved here from England, and generationally, we married into prominent Southern families. One has a county in Virginia named after them. Another supposedly owned a big chunk of what is now known as Washington, D.C. My particular line never became elite elites; we were petty elites, self-taught men who became judges and mayors. My family photos contain images, probably over a hundred years old, of Mount Vernon and General Lee, which were perhaps once hung on the wall of some office as sacred iconography. I get it.

        We must understand that the Civil War wasn’t a crusade to help blacks. It certainly wasn’t about Bolshevism. It was about Capital. A rapidly rising commercial elite overthrew the Southern elite which held two-thirds of the national wealth, and smashed us. Abraham Lincoln was a corporate lawyer who worked for business interests. It was a war not to end slavery but to end Slavocracy. After the war, my ancestors weren’t maudlin religionists helplessly praying that the baby Jesus would make things right; they were hard-drinking blackpillers like Doc Holiday. The old world is lost, permanently lost, and it is never coming back. (This is also the tone of the Princess of Mars stories — John Carter is a Virginian for a reason.)

        The North’s attempt to rebuild the wrecked South was a disaster. The place was saturated with devastated plantations and farms, and little capital was available to develop industry. Emancipated slaves ballooned the workforce, giving unregulated and unscrupulous employers the upper hand over everyone (the decline of the Compson family meant the rise of the Snopes family if you read Faulkner), which trapped many people in sharecropping and tenant farming systems. So many Southern communities were left ravaged by poverty and debt. No one in the North cared. My family on each side escaped that fate but had a parallel fate decades later — they got wiped out in the Great Depression and eventually moved in the Great Migration.

        In his 1854 book Sociology for the South, George Fitzhugh defended Slavocracy precisely because he believed it to be a form of socialism. Why slavery is odious for most today, his arguments about an organic society and the necessity of paternalistic government remain sound. This is not Marxism. The American founding fathers in the South, including Washington, took inspiration from men like Cicero and Cato. The neoclassical architecture of the antebellum South shares this spirit. They were on the side of aristocracy, not the plebs, and certainly not small business or loathsome finance. When Andrew Jackson was elected, there was more of a popular focus as Greater Appalachia grew in population. Still, even he was for curbing financial power and did it quite well.

        After the war, the South was the Solid South for over a hundred years and produced men like Huey Long. State involvement was desperately needed for development and poverty reduction. And Democrats routinely delivered big time for the South with projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, and programs like Social Security that kept the elderly out of extreme poverty. Intellectuals like Charles Graham Sumner preached the invisible hand to justify rule by the new Northern elite as if the South magically demolished itself. The Republican Party just wanted to put blacks in charge, give a do-gooder sermon on the blessings of freedom, and leave the place a wreck.

        Communism is indeed a wretched, truly evil system, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. We’re talking about reining in a system that privileges finance and allows mediocrities like Ben Shapiro to succeed while even talented whites lose ground. We’re not fighting Communism by simping for these shysters.

  8. The bowel Movement has been infiltraited forever. Charlottesville was a set-up with its “leaders” like Dickie Spencer 1/8 jew mischling and Mike the kike Enoch, James Edwards, and Thom Robb’s lawyer spawn as Board Members of The Foundation for the MarketPlace of Ideas . ZOGbot Poverty (F)Law Center. The four-page exhibit below shows as much. The 12-page full copy shows that they financed Charlottesville.

    http://bryanreo-lawsuits.xyz/Reo_19CV001530_f2589/2020/Mar20/14Mar20_ML/Doc%2026-1%20501c3%20Tax%20Form.pdf

    You would have been better off if Charlottesville had been set up by the SPLC with Heidi Beirich and Baal Finck’s cousin Mark Potok.

    http://whitenationalist.xyz/forum/forum/regimeist-vs-resistance-korts-law/law-library/bryan-reo-swordbrethren-vs-white-people/1512-the-zogbot-poverty-f-law-center

    The only Movement which has succeeded is the original Ku Klux Klan which with a campaign of racial domestic terrorism got their vote back and in 1876 and won the selection and in return for letting Rutherfraud B Hayes from NE Ohio ‘win’ in return for pulling out the federal troops and ending Recoonstruction.

    When I got into the Moobmint post the Ft. Smith Sedition trial rebuilding of the base back in 1988 there were plenty of klansmen who were my mentors. They had a casual attitude towards using violence against ZOGbots, negroes, and jews. They did what they thought had to be done, Today their real successors are not these cyrrent bowek Movement white nutionalists but young men like Dylann Rood or Robert Bowers. They are original flavor white supremacists.

    I support them absolutely. You and GRIDS-Grinder Gaywall-Grifting Greggie have jewr place in suborning ZOG/Babylon in an ‘intellectual’ manner, but the future is in Civil War 2 cum-cumming to ZOGmurriKwa and the end result shall be 20-30 million scattered feral ex-whiggers ruled over by decentralized local theocratic military dictatorships I call The Ten Thousand Warlords.

    The real Movement lies in revolutionary violence and ZOG Collapse.

    Hail Victory !!!

    Pastor Martin Lindstedt
    Church of Jesus Christ Christian / Aryan Nations of Missouri

  9. Hunter,

    I’ll post my blog about the 31st anniversary of Ruby Ridge now and how it is very smilier, almost the same as the killing of Craig Robertson.

    I’ll post this hour unless you have any objections.

    Thanks Hunter,

    JR

  10. “”Liberal democracy” is neither liberal or democratic”

    Right.

    In fact, I cannot think of a single label this culture or government comes up with that is anything but the opposite of what it claims to be.

  11. “AS A BRAND, THE ALT-RIGHT IS DEAD”

    Yes, absolutely, in the literal sense…

    HOWEVER … the Alt-Right was not an isolated incident, but, yet another in a long line of sane White Gentiles trying to defend themselves against what I have to term as ‘The Jew England Yankee United States’ Government – and their corporate/academic correllaries.

    Though many feel that it blew up and WAS scattered to the wind (The Alt-Right) I think not, but, rather, see it as a foreshadowing of guys like Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh who are finally finding a way, in the right time, to articulate what must be – a return of America , or numerous parts of it, to a White/European Country – one in which the rights of minorities are safeguarded, but, nonetheless, a White Country.

    I, like tens of tens of millions of my fellow Southerners, and, indeed, smalltown and rural Americans who cannot bring themselves to say it out loud, yet … want to live and die in a White country.

    This country, as it has become, it totally unacceptable to many many tens of millions of us, whether we have the courage to voice it or not.

  12. Three cheers, for JAMES EDWARDS, another great SOUTHERN INTELLECTUAl, another great SOUTHERN SOLDIER, Thank GOD for his show, coming on later tonight….hey, how’s it going pastor linstedt……..

  13. I think it’s sad that American Right-wingers must seek their anti-liberal ideas from old continental thinkers (Evola, Schmitt , etc.).

    You were supposed to get around writing a book; I guess it won’t be this year.

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